Arising out of apathy

My neighbour Don Shafer’s substack is a really good extended exploration of dialogue and democratic participation and today he names an important aspect of the apathy and overwhelm that citizens are feeling.

What many of us experience as chaos is better understood as administration.

Robert Arnold writes that power hasn’t advanced only through spectacle, but through paperwork, procedure, and pace. Executive authority expands while legislatures stall. Oversight is performed rather than enforced. Institutions remain visible, but unreachable. The rituals of democracy continue even as their capacity to interrupt harm thins.

That produces a uniquely destabilizing effect. When the forms remain intact, but outcomes fail, it becomes harder to know where responsibility lies or where pressure can still be applied. In that environment, outrage becomes ambient. Constant. Untethered. And all of it happens faster than it can be named, faster than oversight, faster than response, faster than writing this Substack.

We teach the Chaordic path, the dance between chaos and order that enables self-organization, as an idea that helps leaders and facilitators understand the boundaries of action between those that enable participation and those that induce apathy. At the opposite ends of control and unbounded chaos, which we call “chamos” lies apathy or, as Dave Pollard has written, cultural acedia.

Don nails this. What we can sometimes experience as complete chaos can actually be control and vice versa. It doesn’t matter because the result is the same. I think authoritarians understand this. It’s quite easy push people to apathy through control or chamos. The challenge, especially collectively, is maintaining the structure and form that enables and channels the natural creativity and unpredictability of life towards the emergence of life-giving contexts. Bootstrapping our collective capacity to do that from a place of widespread disenfranchisement and dehumanization is the work right now. As it always has been.